Title: Valkyrie
MPAA: PG-13
Runtime: 120 minutes
Director: Bryan Singer

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

What is a Valkyrie? Being committed to accuracy and factual truth, even if it takes hours of painstaking research, I looked up "Valkyrie" on Wikipedia. I realize that someone may object: Wikipedia is a free-for-all encyclopedia, written by laymen and untrained amateurs who have no special training in the subjects they address - anyone can write anything on any subject they want, even if it's not true. To that objection, I would point out: yes, anyone can make up anything they like and post it as "fact" at Wikipedia, but since it is a free-for-all encyclopedia, anyone else is free to come along and edit the factual errors of others, replacing them with other made-up stuff.

Wikipedia tells us with absolute certainty, until someone edits the entry, that a "Valkyrie" is a mythical goddess figure from Norse mythology. The valkyries choose who will live or die in battle, and they take the fallen heroes to their glory in the afterlife. They also appear to enjoy riding a lot, based on the title of the famous Wagner piece from his opera, Die Walküre. The piece is instantly recognizable to the culturally well-rounded, by which I mean, of course, anyone who has watched Bugs Bunny cartoons.

But this post is, as far as I can tell from the title, a review of the movie Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise and bunch of other guys whose faces will have you distracted for the entire movie, thinking, "What movie did I just see him in?!" (the answer, in order, is Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Batman Begins).

As the movie begins, we find Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) writing in a diary, giving voice to his sincere feeling that he has had it up to here with Hitler and the Nazis - which is rather unfortunate, since Stauffenberg is, technically, a high-ranking officer in the German army. Even this would not be so difficult a problem, if not also for the rather inconvenient fact that World War II is in full swing, which puts Stauffenberg in a bit of a pickle.

Luckily, he is then horribly maimed in battle, which gives him a reason to decide, "Ah, the hell with it, I think I'll assassinate Hitler and save Germany." And Stauffenberg's plot would probably have succeeded, except that Valkyrie just opened in theaters on Christmas Day of 2008, while Steven Spielberg's epic film Schindler's List, in which Germany loses the war and Hitler kills himself, has been a wildly popular movie since the early 1990s - so Stauffenberg was doomed to fail.

The movie runs for an even two hours, the first hour being dedicated to the planning and plotting of the assassination, and the last hour showing how the first hour was a complete waste of time. Personally, I would have liked to have seen a little more build-up in the beginning; by the time we meet Stauffenberg, he has already resolved his internal crisis of where he stands - he must oppose Hitler in order to truly serve the Germany he loves. It would have been nice to see what led him to that conclusion. If The Matrix: Reloaded and Spiderman 3 could run over the two-hour limit, surely a decent historical movie like Valkyrie could be given a little more room to explore its subject.

The movie title, by the way, comes from the name of the emergency military operation that Stauffenberg hoped to trigger after he bumped Der Führer. Operation Valkyrie gave power to the German Reserve Army in the event of Hitler's death and subsequent revolt of the people living in occupied countries; Stauffenberg revised the military operation to also include the arrest of S.S. and Gestapo leaders.

In a pivotal scene in the movie, Stauffenberg and his family are hiding in their bomb shelter during an air raid, while a record player upstairs is cranking out Wagner's Die Walküre. The theme phrase from "Ride of the Valkyries" hits Stauffenberg's ears, and gives him the idea to use Operation Valkyrie as the foundation of his plot. I think it goes without saying that Stauffenberg would have succeeded in his plans if, instead of listening to Wagner's opera, he had been listening to Queen's We Will Rock You.

All in all, it was a very good movie. Lots of high drama and suspense, despite the fact that you know darn well how its going to end, before the movie even begins (this is known as the "Titanic Syndrome"). None of the actors used put-on German accents, a directorial decision that I applaud with unusual intensity. I don't know if I could have sat through a two-hour movie that featured Tom Cruise slushing his way through a faux German dialect.

And the message, as I understood it, is inspirational: not all heroes succeed, because success is not the measure of a hero; the measure of a hero is the determination to do what is right, even if it means you lose everything. Stauffenberg and those who stood with him will be honored by having their story told through this movie, which highlights the fact that not every German citizen was a Hitler groupie.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some ripping good yarns to post at Wikipedia.

+++++++++++

This review was made possible in part by the generosity of Celebration Cinemas in Grand Rapids, MI. Feel like taking in a movie tonight? Celebration has a broad selection of films, stadium-style seating, a clean environment, and best of all, they never show commercials after the advertised showtime. Visit Celebration Cinemas online.